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Barry Larkin Collection 245: 1989 Baseball Card Magazine - #17



Barry Larkin
Year:  1989
Brand:  Baseball Card Magazine
Card number:  17

In 1989, Baseball Card Magazine issued a 72 card set that was an obvious homage to the 1959 Topps set.  The card is printed on rather flimsy stock, but otherwise it's a nice looking set (assuming you like the original '59 design of course).  Larkin's card has the black background but the Baseball Card Magazine set actually featured all manners of background colors as well as a few "special cards" such as this Fence Busters card (image taken from here).
1989 Baseball Card Magazine '59 Topps Replicas #68 Fence Busters (Julio Franco / Eric Davis / Ruben Sierra) Front

The set also includes some "rookie stars" cards with my favorite being this Ken Griffey Jr. card (image taken from here).
1989 Baseball Card Magazine '59 Topps Replicas #63 Ken Griffey Jr. Front
Overall, despite the cheap card stock I like the Barry Larkin quite a bit.  I do wonder who BCM managed to use the Topps design without ever acknowledging Topps on the cards though!  I also like the black background with the Reds' bright red jersey in the photo of Larkin - the color combination comes together quite well (and it looks a lot better than a yellow or pink background would have looked)!  All things considered, this is one of my favorite Barry Larkin cards from 1989 - and it's definitely one of the nicer "oddball" cards in my collection.

Comments

  1. I've always liked the baseball card magazine issues

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  2. And.....Topps and MLB made them stop. There was a proliferation of magazine cards... Baseball Card Magazine, Ballstreet, SI for Kids, Legends, etc. It was at the same time as the proliferation of unlicensed cards from Broder and the like. Many of the cards were better looking that what Topps and the other majors were putting out (iirc, Ballstreet used a pretty thick card stock, some foil and some embossment). And the investor class was buying them up like licensed cards. It was getting pretty much out of hand, to be honest. Lots of things were out of hand in the eighties. Plus Topps had their own magazine starting up and they wanted to included cards. So Topps and MLB put their feet down. Obviously, even then, magazines were not big profit makers, so paying the kind of royalties involved was pretty much out of the question. A few, like SI for Kids, went to non-baseball subjects. Tough to do if your name is Baseball Cards Magazine. BCM were the ones I missed the most.

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